Troubled Waters

Impoverished Laos is unlikely to cancel a Thai project to build a mega dam across the Mekong River at Xayaburi, despite warnings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that it could devastate the region’s rich biodiversity.

Plastic trash is altering the very ecology of the world's oceans. Insects called "sea skaters", a relative of pond water striders, are now laying their eggs on the abundant fingernail-sized pieces of plastic floating in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean instead of relying on a passing seabird feather or bit of driftwood.

The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), whose mandate includes the preservation and protection of the world's fast-degrading oceans, will play a pivotal role in Expo 2012, an international exhibition to be formally opened later this week in the coastal town of Yeosu in South Korea.

Come May 12, South Korea will host its largest single landmark event for the year - an achitecturally-glittering Expo 2012 - continuing a 161-year-old tradition going back to the first Great Exhibition in England in 1851 showcasing the steam engine.

Authorities in Maryland and Virginia have rescued the Chesapeake Bay's blue crab from the brink of collapse, tripling its population in five years, by using methods that emerging crabmeat-exporting countries in Asia and Central America could emulate, scientists say.

A Catholic priest from the Philippines, a mother of three from Argentina, and the founder of the NGO Friends of Lake Turkana in Kenya all have one thing in common: they have helped to motivate their respective local communities to protect the natural environment around them and to stand up for their rights.

So-called water schools, which educate communities on the resource and its links with the environment, gender and climate change, are helping to raise awareness on proper water management in Mexico, at a time of severe drought.

Naseema Akhtar, 38, worries that her daily treks to collect clean water from the mountain springs around her village of Bonpora, in Kashmir’s Kupwara district, are getting longer. She is already doing more than seven km every day.

In this eastern Cuban city, Danny Dip Leyva has begun to use her shower again after decades of hauling water into her house by hand. But in Aurora, a small neighbourhood on the outskirts of Havana, Manuel Roque still longs for a regular supply of piped water.

Sahara Bibi, a 47-year-old poor Muslim woman living on one of the climate- impacted islands of Eastern India’s fragile Sundarbans archipelago in West Bengal state, was forced to pull her two young sons out of school and send one of them to the Southern state of Kerala to earn a decent income.